I recently reviewed Steve Ullom’s delightful book: Cigars with Dog: Conversations & Tall Tails. Today we are going to get to know the main character in his book, Dog, a little better. 1) First of all, Dog, do you have a proper name or is your name actually just “Dog,” or is it your pen name?

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me! My proper name is Canis Lupus Familiaris. But author Ullom has a hard time remembering names period, much less something as distinguished as my full name. He also feels that if certain celebrities are satisfied with only one name, then one short name should be good enough for someone like me who eats out of a dish without utensils. By the way, if one of your readers wants to invent a utensil that someone without opposable thumbs can use, I would appreciate that. 2) Your breed is Dachshund, but some people call Dachshunds Wiener Dogs, which one do you prefer being called? I prefer Dachshund. I am very proud of my German heritage, Ja? “Ich bin ein Berliner” and all that. In fact, I had proposed that the cover of the book should be a picture of me in my holiday lederhosen, but you know who nixed THAT idea. He doesn’t think I have the legs for it. I suspect that comment of his is another attempt at some humor at the expense of my short legs. I do, however, look quite fashionable. 3) In the book you share many afternoons with Steve sitting on the porch smoking cigars and drinking beer. This is a bit unusual for a dog. How did the smoking and the beer drinking get started, and which are your favorite cigars and beers? Being German, you grow up drinking moderately at meals. So that’s how it started. It’s very normal, you know. The smoking started because I was a fan of Groucho Marx, who is a fan of cigars. I don’t have his eyebrows. In fact, I am waggling my eyebrows at you right now but getting no reaction. Anyhow, I thought I could smoke a cigar like him and it would help my comic delivery. By the way, Groucho once said, “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.” So a book about dogs…why there is a two-for-one deal! My favorite cigars are free ones. My favorite beer is a Belgian Ale, along with a nice pretzel. 4) Let me put you in the hot seat Dog. In the book you take it as a given that cats act like they own the world, but don’t you feel the same way? Don’t you act like Steve’s life should revolve around you? Didn’t Steve pay for the opportunity to have his life revolve around me when he put down some hard-earned coin for me as a puppy? At any rate, with a change in architectural styles and standards, his life wouldn’t HAVE to revolve around me. If he put the handle on the back porch door down a bit, I could open that door myself and he wouldn’t be so bothered to let me out “always in the last minute of a close sports game” as he puts it. And when you are my size, you try getting the attention of a clerk at the store. It doesn’t work. So he has to sort of help me out with buying things for me, food, cigars, a new pillow. The things you need to get by in life. 5) Related to the previous question, it has often been pointed out that “Dog” spelled backwards is “God.” Do you have a comment on that? Anubis. The Egyptians, they had it right, didn’t they? Letting us walk around on our back feet with a cool cane and a bottom covering that makes kilts look like budget clothing, all while worshiping us as a god. Although, try to lift a leg sideways to relieve yourself while wearing one of those, and then not dribble on it. That’s a talent, I tell you. 6) In Steve’s book you wrote a spirited rebuttal section for the book. Do you have plans to write a full length book of your own? If so what would this book be about? When I was a teenage pup, I wanted to write the great canine novel. But my interest lately has moved to screenwriting. I want to write something where Lassie stays in the house, maybe smoking a pipe and reading the evening newspaper, instead of running in and pretending to understand human speech while only barking about some ridiculous issue that Timmy got himself into again. Although, to be honest, I would also like to write a tale where a Dachshund and a Hobbit go off together on an adventure. I think they would have an affinity, based on their, uh, closeness to the ground.7) Finally what about STEVE? Does he plan to publish any other books soon? If so do you think you will be one of the characters? He is planning some stories that have a tendency towards the paranormal. Stories where things don’t quite die in the way that we normally think of as the correct sequence in that endeavor. There’s a story about “The Collector” that I like…about a visitor. Another story has a twist on who lives where…and just who is on the other side of the window at night. That one turns out to be a bit comedic. I shouldn’t give too much away, however. There are often dogs in them. I’m a little nervous about being a character in them, to be honest. I don’t know if he can correctly capture my heroic nature. However, one never knows what or who will show up.

Thank you very much, Dog, for agreeing to this interview. We hope we can see more of you in Steve's future books and maybe even a book of your very own. Also thank you very much Steve for allowing me to have Dog over here. We are looking forward to that book of paranormal stories you are planing to publish.

You can contact Dog by reaching Steve Ullmon at his website or following him on Twitter.

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I just read about a cool experiment that you can do at home. You can follow the link, but in a nutshell the experiment involves cutting a piece of cheese into cubes of different sizes. When you place these cheese cubes in a conventional preheated oven you find that the smaller cheese cubes melt first. However, if you place these cheese cubes in a microwave oven it is the larger cubes that melt first! How can this be? The explanation has to do with something called the surface to volume ratio. If you calculate the surface area of a cube and divide this by the volume of that cube, you will find that the smaller cubes have a greater surface to volume ratio than the larger cubes. So when you place the cheese cubes in a conventional oven, the heat enters the smaller cubes much faster (because they have more surface area relative to their volumes) than it enters the larger cubes. Most people that have tried to heat food in a conventional oven have experienced this. The center of bulky pieces of food may remain cold while the outside is hot, whereas smaller pieces heat up faster. But just in the same way that heat gets in faster into a small cheese cube that has a high surface to volume ratio, it is also true that heat can get out equally fast (dissipate) from such cubes. The microwave oven generates heat inside the cubes. In the larger cubes the heat has trouble moving out (because of the lower surface to volume ratio) and accumulates, heating the cube and melting it, whereas in the smaller cubes the heat escapes much faster and the cube doesn’t get as hot. The interesting thing is that this principle also applies to living things. Mice have a very high surface to volume ratio compared to a human being, and tend to lose heat very fast just like the small cheese cubes. This is why mice have a very high metabolic rate (expressed on a per body mass basis) to compensate for this large heat loss. If a mouse had the metabolic rate of a human it would die from hypothermia (lack of heat). Conversely if a person had the metabolic rate of a mouse, he/she would die from over-heating because the heat generated in the large volume of the human body would have trouble getting out through the limited surface area, just like in the large cheese cubes. If an elephant had the metabolic rate of a mouse it would (in theory) boil!

But even more interesting is that we owe our very existence to the principle of the surface to volume ratio. Compare our planet teeming with life to the barren wasteland that is Mars. The Earth is larger than Mars and therefore has a lower surface to volume ratio and cools slowly (like the large cheese cubes). All the heat that gets trapped inside the Earth as a result of this has melted its core, and the spinning of this core generates a magnetic field. This magnetic field protects the Earth against the solar wind, which would otherwise strip away our atmosphere. Unlike the Earth, Mars is smaller (has a high surface to volume ratio) and, like the small cheese cubes, it has cooled faster. As a result of this, its core solidified and stopped spinning a long time ago. When this happened, Mars lost its magnetic field and its atmosphere was stripped away by the solar wind. So there you have it. Who needs expensive labs or particle accelerators? Here is a fundamental physical principle responsible for life that holds true from mice to planets and that you can put to the test in your kitchen. Isn’t that cool? Now next time you get served cheese cubes and crackers at a cocktail party you can impress everyone by talking about the principle of the surface to volume ratio and heat transfer. Please remember to reference this blog! Mouse & Cheese Photo credit: Darny / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND Mars Photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video / Foter.com / CC BY

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Mary W. Walters published an interesting post on her website (The Militant Writer) entitled: Promoting your Book on Facebook and Twitter is a Total Waste of Time. In a nutshell she states that Twitter and Facebook are not effective insofar as selling books is concerned, and that writers are better off employing their time writing or engaging in other promotional activities. In the comment section to the post and in the comments on other blogs that made a reference to this post, several people agreed with the premise, stating they had found exactly the same thing. However, some stated that they were selling books through Twitter and Facebook just fine, and if a writer is not selling books successfully using social media then they are doing something wrong. To this others replied that every time social media doesn’t work the apologists blame the user instead of accepting the truth that social media is a bust. I am no stranger to feeling that social media doesn’t work. The sales of my book The Sun Zebra are lousy despite the fact that it is a highly rated book and that my social media reach and performance has been growing. Should I accept this reality and quit Twitter, Facebook and other sites that take substantial time away from my writing, or am I doing something wrong? As it turns out I think the latter is true. I believe that most writers like me are indeed doing something wrong. What are the majority of my blog posts about? Writing! Who are the majority of my subscribers in Facebook and Twitter? Writers! And the thing is that this is normal. Writers are fascinated by the process of writing and publishing and we are interested in helping our fellow authors and exchanging information and ideas. But here is the issue: the vast majority of readers don’t care for that. Readers are interested in reading and they use social media not to look for new books to read but to be social. Some argue that writers are also readers, but the flaw in this argument is that you cannot achieve high sales figures based on other writers buying your books. For one, most writers expect you to reciprocate the favor. To sell 10,000 copies of your book you cannot buy and read 10,000 books. Also most writers, beside a day job and family responsibilities, are very busy, well, writing. Joe Konrath has remarked that it is readers not writers, who buy his books. To this some may raise the counterargument of synergism. If you have 30 writer friends who write blogs, having your book featured in their blog is an asset. But this depends. If those 30 blogs are also about writing and thus only read by other writers, then the impact is minimal. So I think in the future I will make an effort to diversify away from writing about writing and to befriend more readers in my social media accounts. Also when push comes to shove the best promotional tool a writer can have is many books, so maybe we should all heed the Joe Konrath’s advice “stop reading blogs and get back to work,” which of course includes this one. But just in case you wish to linger a little, just for today, I am going to ask for your opinion. What do you think? ***If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

Jennie Nash is an author who decided to self-publish after publishing six books with traditional publishers. She has written a guest post for Rachelle Gardner’s blog where she discusses the surprises she experienced when she self-published. You can follow the link to the original post. I am going to talk here about her first surprise. She writes: I underestimated the weight of having the legitimacy of a traditional publisher. When I could say, “My third novel is being published by Penguin,” I was not just a wanna-be hopeful novelist. I was legit! I was chosen! Pitching book reviewers was a breeze. Attending high school reunions was a delight. When I ran into more famous writers, we met as colleagues, exchanging e-mails, making dates for lunch. Now that I am self publishing, I am no different than the crazy cat lady down the block who has been working on her memoir for 17 years or the guy at the street fair hawking Xeroxed pamphlets of his poetry about fruit. People smile indulgently when I tell them what I’m doing. Book reviewers politely decline. My doubts about writing, which I’ve spent a lifetime overcoming, have blossomed like a drug-resistant virus. Jennie’s case is interesting because she already had the “legitimacy” of traditional publishers. She was one of the “chosen.” It stands to reason that an author like her would not all of sudden publish crap just because she was now self-publishing. But as you can see from reading the passage above, all of her traditionally-published prestige vanished when the dreaded S-P word became linked to one of her books. Often one of the plusses associated with traditional publishing is the legitimacy mentioned above: the “I am traditionally published ergo I am a good writer” argument. The idea behind this argument is that if you are traditionally published then you have been vetted, you have been certified to be good, and what you publish does not belong in the slush pile. Jennie’s experience exposes the absurdity behind this argument. What gives you the legitimacy is not how good you really are, it’s the label, and once you lose it you are back to square one, again regardless of how good you are. The sad thing is that many self-published authors, even if they don’t say it out loud, crave for this label. There are valid reasons to traditionally publish, but legitimacy is not one of them. If you are willing to pay the price in terms of minuscule advances, dismal royalties, long publishing times, loss of artistic control, loss of your rights to your work, and lack of attention for the promotion of your book if it doesn't hit the big time soon, then I think you ought to have a good reason to traditionally publish other than the label of legitimacy. What do you think? Photo credit: Sudhamshu / Foter.com / CC BY

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In 1977 Stephen King published a novel entitled Rage under the pen name of Richard Bachman. In this novel a troubled high school student kills two teachers using a gun and then holds his class hostage. The gun-toting teen and his hostages end up bonding and talking about their lives and the secrets they have been hiding. The end result is a twisted version of what happens in a movie that was made 8 years later: the teen classic Breakfast Club. I think Rage is a brilliant work with regards to its social commentary. However, insofar as horror is concerned the novel is really not a big deal in a genre that figures all sorts of monsters, psychos, and grotesque occurrences. The problem with Rage is that it made the leap from the fictional into the real. Some actual and attempted school shootings during the 80s and 90s were linked back to the novel when it was discovered that the perpetrators had read it and could have been inspired by it. The author was so shocked by this that he asked his publisher to take the novel out of print. So let me get to the crux of this post. If you found that a book you wrote was inspiring acts of violence, would you remove the book from circulation? We can even take it a step back. Would you write something if you knew that there would be the chance some disturbed person somewhere would use it as an inspiration to harm others? Would you censor yourself? In my next book of short stories, Spirit Women, there are stories where murders are committed. Should I publish it? What if I give ideas to some disturbed person? Would I want that on my conscience? Do I have a social responsibility as a writer? Should I stick to writing the wholesome family stories that are featured in my book The Sun Zebra forever? One problem is that deranged people will be inspired by the craziest things to carry out or justify their acts. Charles Manson and his clan took inspiration from songs by the Beatles (most notably Helter Skelter) and from the book of Revelations in the Bible when carrying out their brutal murders in 1969. Timothy McVeigh made a reference to the reaction of audiences to the blowing of the Death Star in the movie Star Wars to justify the morality of his bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. A sick or troubled mind will twist anything to justify preconceived beliefs. However, the cases above are “abstract” whereas the specific subject matter of novels like Rage is more explicit and therefore more prone to produce copycat behavior. And I do admit that when it comes to kids and guns the issue is way too emotional for me to deal with, especially after the recent Sandy Hook shooting. To answer the questions I posed above, I think that if I had written Rage I would have done like Mr. King and yanked it from the shelves if I had found it could have inspired acts of violence. But would I have written it at all? The puzzling answer is yes. I would have written it and then hoped for the best. The reason behind my apparent contradiction is that I believe stories like Rage are nothing but mirrors. What they show us may not be pretty, but if these stories are censored we would never see our reflection. In the case of Rage that reflection was a society that was ignoring abuse by teachers, bullying by students, and domestic violence in the community. Challenging the status quo always produces conflict and occasionally has tragic consequences, but is censorship and business as usual the alternative? What do you think? ***If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.

In this book the author writes with wit and humor about the many times he and his dog get together at the end of the day to have a smoke and a brew and talk about stuff, just like Alan Shore and Denny Crane did at the end of each episode of the sitcom Boston Legal. And what does a man talk about with his dog over a cigar and a beer? Anything ranging from chasing squirrels, barking, chewing on things, and eating, to having a hard day at the office, the responsibilities any dog owner has to live up to, and even some philosophy! Sometimes they give each other a hard time, sometimes they reminisce about the good old days, and sometimes they just pause to enjoy how the afternoon lazily drifts into night. Reading this book I felt I was entering the world of two best friends and being privy to their conversations. Dog is quite smart and sophisticated, for a dachshund that is, but still prone to let his dog urges take over. Because of this he often finds himself defending his bending and sometimes breaking of the rules that his master has laid out for him. The author however, seems to understand this and is more amused than upset with Dog getting out of line. My favorite chapters were “First Dog,” which was spooky and “The Last Conversation with my Dog (for this book!),” which was really sweet. Overall I thought the author did a pretty good job in presenting his canine companion’s point of view regarding the many issues discussed, but just in case he included a rebuttal by Dog to set the record straight!Stephen Ullmon has written a book that will be enjoyed both by dog lovers and lay people alike. Not only is it funny, but it also displays a keen understanding of canine psychology as well as respect for our four legged friends and their world.

Read the interview with Steve's Dog. ***If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.